


Relativity

by High Flying Kiddo (MerryElderberry)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Gingerose, Gingerrose - Freeform, Roux - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:09:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21671998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MerryElderberry/pseuds/High%20Flying%20Kiddo
Summary: A space squirmish turned into a destructive debacle forces Rose and Hux to push the Finalizer deep into the Unknown Regions, where they become stranded with only  the ship's increasingly erratic AI and a broody porg as companions.
Relationships: Armitage Hux & Brendol Hux, Armitage Hux & Rae Sloane, Armitage Hux/Rose Tico, Finn/Rose Tico
Comments: 8
Kudos: 39





	1. Armitage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Semperfidani](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Semperfidani/gifts).



> Some time anomalies are to be expected (this is the unstable Unknown Regions, after all!)  
> Rating will change to M in later chapters.  
> Happy Life Day, y'all!

“It’s a family tradition to become a man on your fifteenth Life Day.”

Armitage very much doubted that his father’s family had family traditions to uphold, and in any case, quaint concepts as “family traditions” were discouraged even amongst the highest ranks of the First Order. The idea of sending him into the Ilum wilderness came from Maratelle, who’d like nothing better than to see him dead, but he kept his mouth shut.

“How old are you, Armitage?”

“Sir, fourteen standard years, sir.”

“Are you, now?” his father asked, pinching and twisting Armitage’s biceps. “You are so delicate that I would have thought you were younger.” He released the arm. “It will have to do. So, tomorrow we will be coming out of hyperspace next to Ilum.”

“Sir.”

“Abandoned Imperial mining outpost. We – the Empire started an overambitious engineering project there thirty-odd years ago. There should be some decent buildings. No lifeforms, though. Should be easy enough for your trial.”

Oh, his father was truly a relic of the Empire. The trial of manhood. As if the Emperor had been a paragon of masculinity himself. As if these barbaric rites were of any use in space.

Armitage stared at the unblinking red lights over the doorframe, and they stared right back at him.

“You will be equipped with cold-weather gear and basic wilderness tools – water purifiers, sparkers, and so on, as well as a communicator. A drop-ship will pick you up in five days.”

Brendol Hux had stopped behind Armitage, resting a hand on his shoulder. Armitage felt the childish pull to look at his father’s hand, but he kept his eyes above the doorframe, knowing better than to look for reassurance.

His father's fingers dug into his shoulder socket, numbing his right arm.

“That will be all.”

Armitage turned around, lifting his hand through an act of sheer will, and saluted before turning on his heels and leaving through the metal maws of the automatic door.


	2. Rose

Rose knew that the Finalizer was doomed before anyone else in the entire universe.

Which was unfortunate, because she – and one particularly cuddly porg that had been napping in one of the deep pockets of her stolen First Order vest – were aboard and trapped, with nowhere else to go.

That had never been part of the plan. The plan, conceived by Finn, Poe and herself after a particularly successful supply run, consisted in tying up the TIE-fighters (and their pilots) on an idiotic run after the Millennium Falcon (accomplished) then tricking the Finalizer’s stormtroopers into boarding a vulnerable Resistance ship that had actually been programmed to strand them in a friendly backwater planet (accomplished) and then use a code that one of their allies on the Core had slid t them to take over the Finalizer, one of the best Star Destroyers of the First Order fleet put to the service of the Resistance.

Finn and Poe’s eyes had been so shiny, their grip on her shoulders so enthusiastic, that Rose had been swept away by their plan. It was also incredibly non-destructive and if Finn was right about the stormtroopers conditioning, a good action worthy of Life Day.

They’d forgotten about the Hutts, because it had been decades since anyone had thought about the Hutts. When the larger transport ships that abandoned the Finalizer and crashed against the planetary shield of Madron, Finn had cheered, thinking Madron was coming to help them.

Then an entire battalion of X-wings had been taken down from the planet’s surface, and the laughter had died.

What had followed was a barrage of orders and counterorders screamed over the comms in varying levels of formality and desperation.

“This is commander Dameron, from the Resistance, addressing the honorable Yaga the Hutt to stop all friendly fire!”

“Unless Madron stop all fire and lowers the planetary shield, the First Order will lay waste to every living being on the surface.”

“This is commander Finn, we are on a diplomatic mission –” the comm had crackled as if the technology itself couldn’t believe its ears. “—we mean no harm, we’ll be out of your way in a moment.”

Instead of an answer, Yaga the Hutt deployed her own fleet, and in a matter of minutes, the Finalizer and the Tantive IV were separated by a swarm of Huttese ships. 

Rose had barely landed on a confiscated Imperial transport when a triad squadron, skimming the surface of the Finalizer, fired at the officer’s quarters, scalping the top of the ship like an Ewok on heat. The lights on the hangar where Rose tumbled in blinked once, as the floor shook under her feet. A second triad of Huttese ships approached the port, and Rose (and all the officers left standing around her) ran for their lives to the automatic doors.

She crossed the threshold just before they trapped her between unfriendly Hutt fire and the void of space. Rose felt the rattle of a hundred TIEs exploding behind the snapping durasteel.

“Captain! What are your orders?!” asked a young girl wearing the same teal uniform as Rose, her cap askew and her platinum blonde hair unraveling from a tight bun under her left ear. Other faces turned to her, expectant and terrified.

Right. Her bars said that she was a captain. Rose jutted her chin forward, as she had seen Finn do so many months ago aboard the Supremacy.

“Initiate the evacuation protocol,” the girl – a sergeant, Rose read on her lapel – nodded, and with a tight click of her heels turned around and ran away. “Women and children first!” cried Rose as an afterthought, because that’s what the Resistance might have said. 

But then she realized that most of the First Order officers around her were simultaneously women and children. None of them looked a day over fourteen.

That made Rose very angry – only the Maker knew how long had these kids spent in the Finalizer, stolen from their families by the First Order, brainwashed into obedience. She could spare ten seconds from her mission to try and get this group to safety, at least.

She pulled up one by her elbow, as forcefully as she could. “Evacuate. Now!” she screamed into the girl’s ear. The teen winced and saluted, trying to turn on her heels but stumbling over when the ship trembled again.

“You!” she said, addressing a dark-skinned girl with large, droopy eyes wearing the orange vest of a radar technician. “Do you know how to micro-jam a vessel?”

Even covered in durasteel shards, with high-ranking officers trampling past them in utter terror, this one had the energy to roll her eyes at her. “Duh!”

Good. That was good. She was probably a contractor and not a recruit, which meant that her brain cells should work better than the rest of the group combined, particularly if they were forced to improvise in deep space.

“Drop the attitude! You will go with this group, get into an evacuation pod with them, and make sure that your ship is undetectable.” She barked the star coordinates of the same planet where the stormtroopers were going.

“Ma’am, yes, ma’am!”

The group trotted off, and Rose was free to run in the opposite direction, to the secret emergency bridge that only the First Order High Command (and the cleaning crew) knew about, the one manned by a skeleton crew in case the main bridge was totaled.

“Rose, are you okay?” asked Finn over the communicator.

“Yes,” she said, turning a corner and sliding into a side door that should take her to a labyrinthine set of stairs. “I’m in. How are you handling the Hutts?”

“Badly. We’ve lost two squadrons, and even Poe is freaking out.”

“Oh. What about the decoy ship?”

“Don’t worry about that. Look -- we can abort the mission. We can pick you up. We don’t really need a Star Destroyer. Just say the word.”

It was tempting, but she was already too far away from the emergency pods – and so close to the bridge. Rose bit her lip, touched the slicing pack, felt her moon-shaped pendant against her skin, and the slicing disc next to the pendant. 

“Tell Poe to manoeuver so that the Hutts and the First Order pilots run into each other. Keep an eye on the decoy chip. Oh, and don’t shoot the transports evacuating the Finalizer, there are only kids inside.”

“Rose – we cannot hold the position much longer. We don’t really need a Star Destroyer.”

“We do. Think of how happy Rey will be just when she sees the rations.”

Finn chuckled. Rose could almost hear the sweat running down his back. An officer in a dark grey uniform rammed against her shoulder and kept running.

“I’ll hurry up. Rendezvous in Belli’s Moon?”

“You know, when you said that we should save what we love I never thought you meant to save a Star Destroyer,” said Finn. Rose smiled tightly, and that’s when she felt something warm and flurry unfurling next to her hip. A porg. She cursed under her breath.

“I want that too, sweetheart," Finn joked. "Hurry up. I love you.”

“I love you too,” Rose whispered in case one of the First Order officers running past her was listening, curling her palm protectively over the porg, trying to coax it to go back to sleep.

The comm crackled, and Rose knew she had to say goodbye.

“I’m at the bridge’s door. Over and out.”


	3. Armitage

Armitage found the last snowtrooper deep within one of the phosphorescent crystal caves – and just in time, because as the night fell, so did his body temperature. He could feel his blood draining away from his lips, his nose, his fingertips, like slow mercury sludge.

He waited until he’d reached the body to take off his snow goggles to better squint into the dark. The white armor had cracked in three places, and blood had seeped into the trooper’s white woolen cape like a deep stroke blooming with frosted flowers. He had fallen from one of the platforms that overlooked the cave, a mine in its infancy. 

The first item that Armitage scavenged was the cape, unlocking the magnetic clasps with numb fingers. Maybe that was what using the Force felt like, flexing an invisible, insensitive extra limb to lift rocks. 

For a moment, standing in the soothing light, with the thick cape in one hand and his hiking gear in the other, he was tempted to lie down next to the corpse and huddle next to it to capture as much residual heat as he could. He could use his backpack as a pillow and just close his eyes for a few minutes. But he knew enough to know that on a planet like Ilum, he would never wake up.

No -- the only option was to keep moving until he found what he’d been looking for. His particular stormtrooper – IC-223, said his tag—was the last of a squadron deployed to protect something – although not for him. He had been on the lookout before he fell to his death. 

Or before something or someone, pushed it.

Armitage removed IC-223’s armor as fast as he could, and then he stripped the body of its thermal underclothes. The tips of everything were dark and bruised, and Armitage tried not to look at the bits breaking off with brittle snaps. He piled the armor next to IC-223’s head, took his rations, heat patches, and sparkler (it had been, unsurprisingly, defective) and plunged into the darkness of the cave, as fast and as silently as he could.

The ground felt spiky even beneath the thick soles of his boots. There were enough crystal formations beneath his feet to light up the entire galaxy with clean energy or to power up a million Death Stars. And yet, without the proper conductors and containers or, lacking that, the Force, they were only pretty shiny stones. He didn’t have the Force – his father’d had him tested, with routinely disappointing result – but he had read everything there was about the more… democratic properties of kyber crystals.

He found the topic fascinating, which is why he’d sliced into Maratelle’s tablet, adding old propaganda holodoc about idiotic Jedi rites of passage and the wonders of the Imperial Mining Industry. She had swallowed the bait, regurgitating it as a poisonous suggestion to send “sweet little Armie,” into the frozen wilderness, and his father had thought it was a marvelous idea.

Armitage brushed aside the residual bitterness of being right, and reminded himself that other than the three dead stormtroopers, everything was going according to his plan. He’d downloaded the old Imperial plans, he had requisitioned a snow glider, and he was going to come out of this cursed planet more powerful than his father, on his terms.

He turned on the lamp attached to his snow goggles. The cave entrance had disappeared far behind him, and the temperature had slightly increased. The crystals around him glimmered like neon stars, and the walls, just like the Galaxy, seemed to go on forever. He was on the right track.

There was even a nook with a wide ledge in the cave, perfect to camp for the night.

Armitage took a step towards it, and the ground broke beneath his feet. He screamed as he fell into a pit.


End file.
